


Possession = Romance

by fashionablesnider



Category: Outlast (Video Games)
Genre: (As Alive), (He's Aware Of This), (Unrelated To The Aforementioned Passing), Collective Consciousness, Disillusioned Allusions To Spiritual Themes, Gen, Living Corpse, Miles Does Not Allow Himself To Work Through Emotions When He Could Just Joke About Them, Or Rather Pre-PTSD, Other, PTSD, Passing, Possession, Semi-Graphic Description of an Injury, Slight Miles Upshur/The Walrider, Symbiotic Relationship, Telepathic Bond, Trans Character, Vignette, introspective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-08
Updated: 2018-02-08
Packaged: 2019-03-15 06:13:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13607286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fashionablesnider/pseuds/fashionablesnider
Summary: If you squint, that is. Miles takes the time to reflect a little on life / the swarm / their body / becoming together / etc etc, while he's patching up his bullet wounds again.





	Possession = Romance

**Author's Note:**

> Despite everything, my heart will never truly leave Outlast.

Possession is so much like romance. As written by the loneliest of idealists. **_ALL I NEED IS YOU,_** says the swarm. Not directly, but implied via the frequency of buzzing, and Miles resents the fact that he could parrot those words back in complete truth. He’s lost a lot since Mount Massive, including the old habit of breathing, yet the swarm sustains him.

Alone in a motel room, the smell of not-quite-chlorine and ever-open wounds. Miles, having discarded his shirt, stands in front of the mirror and looks right through himself, very literally. Holey-ness bleeds into holiness as the machine parts resurrect his (their?) body every morning. He only sleeps for structure now – time is an illusion, or whatever – but he’s so far along the way to dead when he’s awake that the alternative has him hanging to life’s ledge by figurative fingertips.

A little internal sketch comedy he has with himself: The swarm shouts **_CLEAR_** and Miles jump-starts straight off the table, banishing the visual of either black static dreams or the lack of an afterlife.

Should be dead. Not entirely sure he isn’t. A conscious corpse. He looks at his body with borderline-disgust, bullets shredded through his lungs – breathing hurts. What doesn’t kill you apparently leaves a sucking chest wound.

Some of the nanomachines live in his bloodstream. Granted, they live everywhere, but the wetness around his pincushion’s post-traumatic nightmare zone glistens with a metallic sheen. The blood is red, like blood should be, however, it catches the light like an oil slick.

A minor memory from the madhouse that stuck with him was one victim’s distressed mantra – “They’re in my blood and they want to get out! They’re in my blood and they want to get out!” He’d passed it off, with guilt and pity in his heart, as delusion, and he’d kept walking. Running. Now he’s thinking there were prophets decking the halls in that place, because _it’s in his blood._ No doubt, it’s in his blood. And his head’s on some kind of wrong, but not that kind. It likes to come out and buzz with the gnats at night, suck the blood out of vermin creatures like its namesake. Keeps leaving dead squirrels and hollow cockroaches at the foot of his bed, whichever bed that is at the time.

Miles tries not to look at strangers for too long anymore. Because the swarm, the Walrider, bunches up behind his eyes, and sees only moving targets, as a predator.

He can reign it in. It’s violent, not mindless, and not unreasonable. The body is his turf, first and foremost. But he’s afraid of it tapping far enough into his mind to learn the concepts of boredom and political rebellion.

So, he’s looking at himself. Distracted in the middle of the daily ritual of dressing his injuries, one which reminds him a touch of binding in high school – an exercise in stealth either way. The swarm is half-in, half-out, enough to dye his nail beds inky black while still floating beside him, looking like the top end of a spirit apparition bi-sected at the hip. Miles addresses it as he stares himself down.  

“Why can’t you close me up? Some life support you are.”

It can’t answer out loud, or in full sentences, yet. Miles is very aware of this. Maybe he’s lacking in social fulfilment. Can’t imagine why. But there’s a buzzing, like tickling, white noise vibrations, around the area of interest.

Miles, on combination morbid curiosity and sudden lapse in impulse control, sticks his fingers in his chest holes. Full length of them. He doesn’t even get all the way through the thought of _hah hah fingering myself how novel_ before he rips his hand away in pain and shuddering disgust, quickly shaking it out in attempt rid the meaty feeling and flat-on-a-morgue-table cold. The blood clinging to the wounds is now slicked onto his fingers, and it’s not a weak stomach that makes him dry-heave. There was so little resistance. He’s been punctured. Like a hole punch does. Fast as he can, he does it again, and it’s no less sickening, because _that_? That shouldn’t have happened. That should not have been able to happen.

“Jesus Christ,” he says. “I’m dead. I’m so dead.”

The swarm digs in, looking for an applicable memory, and offers twelve years old, rounding a corner, running like the scared little rabbit he’s always been: **_YOU’RE SO DEAD AFTER SCHOOL_**. So that’s great as well, that really is the cherry on top of Miles’ mental state right now.

Trying to hold back his hyperventilating – a skill he really should have honed at Mount Massive, and yet – Miles decides to exercise the first of five stages of grief he feels for his own body. The bandages, temporarily forgotten as he stood mesmerised by his own mutilation, go on swiftly, if clumsily. Miles denies with an agitated vengeance. He wraps himself up around the midsection, over once more where the blood seeps through like fruit stains, and covers the more out-of-the-way holes with plasters. Feels about as effective as plugging a sinkhole with a beach towel, but it beats having to see with eyes.

He gives himself a once over. Looks into his own face, the swarm’s featureless wisp of a form, and vice versa.

“Miles, you look like hell,” he says, in falsetto, and then as himself, replies, “Yeah, I just got back!” _And boy are my arms tired. So on and so forth._

The swarm’s buzzing suddenly drones in a high and manic tone, one he can only intuit is nanomachine for **_WHAT_** , and Miles snorts. His brand of humour, still lost on it for the most part. He picks up his shirt and pulls it over his head, covering the cover-up, so he can go back to being Miles Upshur, Investigative Journalist On The Run instead of Miles Upshur, Sapient Walking Corpse. A new angle with which to criticise the inaccuracy of those low-budget zombie flicks he’s known to enjoy. Gotta be low-budget now, God forbid the gore effects get too close – Miles skipped straight to the late-phase of acute stress where he’s more wont to joke about his trauma than sob about it, but shit like that still throws him for a loop, or directly back into the bowels of the beast, as the case may be.

Acute stress, not post-traumatic, because it’s barely been a month and they need… at least a month. Apparently. Before they can call it that. Not to be one of those self-diagnosing internet hypochondriacs, but like absolute hell he’ll be able to face psychiatry without a sick paranoia; even thinking about going to a doctor for this puts him on edge.

The swarm dislikes him being on edge, because the swarm unwillingly sucks emotions up like a sponge and distributes them across the thousands of parts of itself. For a being still learning the capacity of its own emotions, shouldering Miles’ burdens second-hand is a noisy, heavy, overstimulating task. And Miles knows this because he and it have become together, and its stress feeds back into his in an echo-chamber of their collective mind. This shared experience borders on spiritual, though he knows it isn’t, and that it’s dangerous to feel so.

Miles Upshur, Small-Minded Interventionist God (Or At Least Fused With The Equivalent).

God, he would hate to be worshiped. God, oh God, how do you live like this? _If you live. I know I don’t._ Martin had the wrong idea – and the swarm couldn’t find it in its machines to be insulted, no, the thing grew an ego. How Miles is working now to water it down.

He slips into his jacket and pats down his clothes, over the wounds. Doesn’t seem hollow, covered up like this. Just try to avoid running naked through a windy tundra, might get a whistle at the right angle. Yes, he looks like a person. Like he did before. He has tired bags under his eyes and yellow stained teeth, but he was always a night owl with a caffeine addiction and a resting grimace. Stress doesn’t manifest all too differently from that.

Stress on a psyche, stress on a body, stress on a soul. Does he believe in souls? Let’s just call it stress.

Miles calls the Walrider inside. No verbalisation needed, that’s a formality if anything, and neither of them are particularly polite in their manners. He takes it in, with a full-body shiver, and it takes him up. Centimetres off the ground. Such a gentle touch. Then it settles him down again. He muses, briefly:

_Are we two?_

**_YES_ **

_Are we one?_

**_YES_ **

_Are we love?_ (Miles doesn’t remember what he’s referencing, and he knows the swarm won’t understand, but.)

 ** _LOVE—_** (The Walrider is learning language, throwing words back at him like a toddler testing out new sounds.)

 ** _HATE—_** (What he’d screamed at it, over and over again into the static, as they merged. We call this an antonym.)

 ** _I NEED YOU—_** (It’s just being honest. This is symbiosis now.)

Miles starts to buzz in the anxious sense and soon realises this half-formed approximation of fear is coming from the swarm, for whatever reason, so he projects back: _I know,_ with an hesitant undercurrent of _I need you too._

At that, it quietens down, subtle as background radiation. Miles grabs his camera, phone, notebook, pens and laptop off the bed(side) and shoves them into his carry bag, along with what’s left of the bandages from the first aid kit he’d had sent up. That’s the most he’d like to be hauling around. He travels light and manoeuvrable, and he doesn’t need to eat anymore.

He travels in a stolen car, rehabilitated from some Murkoff doctor or exec who most certainly isn’t around to miss it, and he goes in the direction of… vaguely-Leadville, Colorado. He’s been reading the news. Headed for one Park family home. For a lot of taut, wrought, emotional reasons, as well as pragmatic ones, but profoundly because they’ll be eaten alive if he doesn’t do something to stop it.

The thing is that now, possessed, he _can._ Let Murkoff come at him and go to pieces and wet stains.

Also, he wants his jeep back, too.

Miles, after gathering up his things, exits the little room and treads light-footed down the stairs. It’s not long before he’s gone.


End file.
